Le Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:50:13 -0700, average <dreamingforward@gmail.com> s'exprima ainsi:

What Tav's proposal, in my mind, is aiming to do is provide greater syntactic support within Python so as to minimize cognitive gibberish when the code is reified in the mind of the viewer. Of course, it doesn't help that were culturally trained into VonNeuman architecture-thinking were such conflation of dimensionality is built into the hardware itself. Really, like Stephan is pointing out, "re-ification" *IS* the best analogy to help elucidate of this issue (better in German: Verdinglichung). See wikipedia's "Reification (Marxism)" (--though be prepared that, depending on your state of mind, it will either make sense or sound like its logic is [perfectly] backward, like some flipped bit because it borders that special interplay between subject-object.)

These kind of [Anonymous] functions/code blocks explicitly tell the user that "This is NOT part of my program", yet (due to the classical, flat nature of standard computer programming) I must "include" (in a constrained way since I'm not able to include the context or externalized identity in which this code will be run) it here [in my editor window text] even though its logical geometry is orthogonal to my program. It's like a vortex out of flatland--an interface into a different dimension, hence it's difficulty in explaining it to the natives of flatlandia. To put a name on it puts an identity label upon something pointing in the wrong direction (i.e. to the surrounding code) which isn't *meant* to be an an independent block of usable code or be part of the social context of its surroundings. It's like seeing your own body's innards mapped inside-out into a computer program and calling it "marcos" while I continue to function normally in some other dimensionality in some mysterious way to magically maintain my normal cognition elsewhere. Better to see those innards as anonymous data (that for whatever reason I'm needing to interface to) even though they are perfectly functioning blocks with an identity elsewhere (i.e.: me). So, yes, "anonymity" can be a virtue from a given perspective.

...Seems to be a parallel to meta-programming [...]

Indeed. In the concatenative jargon such code-data constructs are called "quotations". :squares [dup *] map ... [1 2 3] squares yields [1 4 9] [dup *] (dup means duplicate) is sensibly called a quotation, I guess, by analogy to meta-linguistic expressions that "objectify" a snippet of speech. [dup *] holds the literal expression of a valid func def, as illustrated by: :square dup * It is pushed on the data stack that should already hold a sequence ([1 2 3]), then both are data items used by map. Read: the higher order func map takes a func def and a sequence as arguments. Now this is alien (fremd ;-) to anybody used to languages in which code is not, conceptually, *really* data -- even if it has a type and can be denoted, in python, simply by letting down the (). denis ------ la vita e estrany

Le Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:50:13 -0700, average <dreamingforward@gmail.com> s'exprima ainsi:

What Tav's proposal, in my mind, is aiming to do is provide greater syntactic support within Python so as to minimize cognitive gibberish when the code is reified in the mind of the viewer. Of course, it doesn't help that were culturally trained into VonNeuman architecture-thinking were such conflation of dimensionality is built into the hardware itself. Really, like Stephan is pointing out, "re-ification" *IS* the best analogy to help elucidate of this issue (better in German: Verdinglichung). See wikipedia's "Reification (Marxism)" (--though be prepared that, depending on your state of mind, it will either make sense or sound like its logic is [perfectly] backward, like some flipped bit because it borders that special interplay between subject-object.)

These kind of [Anonymous] functions/code blocks explicitly tell the user that "This is NOT part of my program", yet (due to the classical, flat nature of standard computer programming) I must "include" (in a constrained way since I'm not able to include the context or externalized identity in which this code will be run) it here [in my editor window text] even though its logical geometry is orthogonal to my program. It's like a vortex out of flatland--an interface into a different dimension, hence it's difficulty in explaining it to the natives of flatlandia. To put a name on it puts an identity label upon something pointing in the wrong direction (i.e. to the surrounding code) which isn't *meant* to be an an independent block of usable code or be part of the social context of its surroundings. It's like seeing your own body's innards mapped inside-out into a computer program and calling it "marcos" while I continue to function normally in some other dimensionality in some mysterious way to magically maintain my normal cognition elsewhere. Better to see those innards as anonymous data (that for whatever reason I'm needing to interface to) even though they are perfectly functioning blocks with an identity elsewhere (i.e.: me). So, yes, "anonymity" can be a virtue from a given perspective.

...Seems to be a parallel to meta-programming [...]

Indeed. In the concatenative jargon such code-data constructs are called "quotations". :squares [dup *] map ... [1 2 3] squares yields [1 4 9] [dup *] (dup means duplicate) is sensibly called a quotation, I guess, by analogy to meta-linguistic expressions that "objectify" a snippet of speech. [dup *] holds the literal expression of a valid func def, as illustrated by: :square dup * It is pushed on the data stack that should already hold a sequence ([1 2 3]), then both are data items used by map. Read: the higher order func map takes a func def and a sequence as arguments. Now this is alien (fremd ;-) to anybody used to languages in which code is not, conceptually, *really* data -- even if it has a type and can be denoted, in python, simply by letting down the (). denis ------ la vita e estrany